I find the comments on what young adults are doing with freeform play on the internet very interesting. Sometimes we forget that our hobby is as much about the roleplaying as the game. Properly presented that aspect of our hobby could be very appealing to many. I am a firm believer in the "Soap Opera effect" of good roleplaying.

Again the object of using observations like this isn't to reignite the fad that was D&D in the 80s but rather get our portion of the hobby on a sustainable basis and have some fun along the way.

Again thanks to Oddysey for a well written post. We need more young whipper-snappers like here. I am adding her to the blogroll so we can see what next she has to say.

Wow. Glad to see people enjoying that post. This is something I've been struggling to say for a while, and think is really important, so it's nice to see people get it, and get something out of it.

It'll be really interesting to see where the OSR goes from here. Right now most of the active work is being done by the Red Box crowd (just like in most areas of gaming...) but I know more than a few younger folks who really grok "old school" and things like it. I'm hoping they'll go places with those games.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.